Searching: Research & Analysis

Promoting Competition in Mobile Payments: The Role of USSD

Unstructured supplementary service data (USSD), a communications service controlled by mobile network operators, is a critical piece of infrastructure used to provide mobile financial services on most phones, at low cost, and without requiring access to the user’s SIM card.

The Potential of Digital Data

The amount of electronic data generated by computerization—digital data—is growing at unprecedented rates. Financial services are an information business—can this growing wealth of data be harnessed to advance financial inclusion?

Driving Scale and Density of Agent Networks in Perú

Beyond banking, mobile networks also use agents to sell airtime and offer other payments services. In 2005 Perú enacted agent banking rules, and since then a number of players and models have emerged.

Informed Consent: How Do We Make It Work for Mobile Credit Scoring

This report explores what consumers understand about their mobile data, and how it is being used by financial service providers and what methods for informed consent might help ensure that individual borrowers understand how their information is used.

Access to Energy via Digital Finance: Models for Innovation

Globally, over 1.3 billion people lack access to electricity, and another 1 billion people have unreliable connections to national electricity grids. Startup energy enterprises are leveraging digital finance to deliver modern energy to the poor, sold on a pay-as-you-go basis.

bKash Bangladesh: A Fast Start for Mobile Financial Services

bKash launched in the second half of 2011, grew to 2 million accounts by the end of 2012, and shot up to 11 million registered accounts by the end of 2013.

The Business Case for Youth Savings: A Framework

This paper offers a framework for understanding how different influences or “levers” affect costs and revenues for youth savings and uses examples to explain how the framework can be applied as a decision-making tool.

Serving Smallholder Farmers: Recent Developments in Digital Finance

This Focus Note introduces some recent developments in digital financial services for smallholder farmers. The case studies identify traditional pain points in serving this segment, discuss how DFS are being used, and highlight some initial obstacles and successes.

Mobile Payments Infrastructure Access and Its Regulation

This research shows USSD access is an important competition issue in many countries since there are no effective substitutes that have been proven at scale.

Electronic G2P Payments: Evidence from Four Lower-Income Countries

This Focus Note presents the evidence gained from a comprehensive study of the experiences in developing and implementing e-payment schemes linked to financial inclusion in Haiti, Kenya, the Philippines, and Uganda.